2 August 2021 Characterizing deformable mirrors for the MagAO-X instrument
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

The MagAO-X instrument is an extreme adaptive optics system for high-contrast imaging at visible- and near-infrared wavelengths on the Magellan Clay Telescope. A central component of this system is a 2040-actuator microelectromechanical deformable mirror (DM) from Boston Micromachines Corp. that operates at 3.63 kHz for high-order wavefront control (the tweeter). Two additional DMs from ALPAO perform the low-order (the woofer) and non-common-path science-arm wavefront correction (the NCPC DM). Prior to integration with the instrument, we characterized these devices using a Zygo Verifire Interferometer to measure each DM surface. We present the results of the characterization effort here, demonstrating the ability to drive the tweeter to a flat of 6.9 nm root-mean-square (RMS) surface (and 0.56 nm RMS surface within its control bandwidth), the woofer to 2.2-nm RMS surface, and the NCPC DM to 2.1-nm RMS surface over the MagAO-X beam footprint on each device. Using focus-diversity phase retrieval on the MagAO-X science cameras to estimate the internal instrument wavefront error, we further show that the integrated DMs correct the instrument WFE to 18.7 nm RMS, which, combined with a 11.7% pupil amplitude RMS, produces a Strehl ratio of 0.94 at Hα.

© 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2329-4124/2021/$28.00 © 2021 SPIE
Kyle Van Gorkom, Jared R. Males, Laird M. Close, Jennifer Lumbres, Alex D. Hedglen, Joseph D. Long, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Olivier Guyon, Maggie Y. Kautz, Lauren Schatz, Kelsey L. Miller, Alexander T. Rodack, Justin M. Knight, and Katie M. Morzinski "Characterizing deformable mirrors for the MagAO-X instrument," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 7(3), 039001 (2 August 2021). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.7.3.039001
Received: 24 March 2021; Accepted: 15 July 2021; Published: 2 August 2021
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CITATIONS
Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Actuators

Point spread functions

Deformable mirrors

Wavefronts

Cameras

Adaptive optics

Interferometers

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